In my last blog post I talked about our plans for the Scraperwiki webscraper that took information from Birmingham City Council’s website and combined it, on a map, with other data sets, including population and health information.

We hoped to find out more about the relationship between population density, deprivation and the provision of leisure facilities.

We – well, Edward and James (who got the Scraperwiki mug for his brilliant code) – were able to make some pretty cool scrapers:-

Birmingham Deprivation Data By Ward

Birmingham Population Density By Ward

And, lastly…

Birmingham City Council Leisure Centre Locations, Opening Times, Services and Facilities

As it happens, we had such a good time scraping that we didn’t get as far as we would have liked with the mashing up. This, I understand, is a common problem. It can be hard to get your data visualised as you’d like – and something we shall be working on, no doubt. I reckon, however, that much of our problem was the result of us generally having a very good time – and chatting a lot. We were able to get together a lovely Google map that shows off all the leisure centres in Brum.

If you click on the pins it’ll give you loads of information, in fact too much for the poor iframe to take! Try having a look at the map (that Daniel Bentley built) in Google Fusion Tables proper.

We have more plans for it, which I’ll talk about tomorrow, when I’ve had sleep. But the Scraperwiki day was fantastic fun – and it was great to work with such interesting, clever people. Thanks very much to James Shuttleworth, Daniel Bentley, Philip John and Edward Saxton for their general excellence – and also to the Scraperwiki crew for a cracking day.